lost and found
by softmyths
Summary: "she says, 'it is not your fault.' (sometimes, the people you love are just as broken as you are.)" / luna, ginny, neville, the other lost souls of hogwarts, and how they saved each other.


pandora died when luna was seven, and that was the problem. in another world, luna retreated from reality in a way that was almost acceptable, but she built up an armor made from her fantasies. in this one, pandora left her with nothing but her cold skin, no armor, no shield to protect herself. in this one luna was not built up by her mother's death but torn down.

luna was eleven and young and good-hearted and very broken. four years before her mother had died. four years is so terribly long for a girl of eleven, but it is also shorter than a lifetime. luna had lived a lifetime, and now she felt like she was living an afterlife.

luna's father sent her to hogwarts with tales of a warm tower full of blue books and silver walls and roaring fire. xenophilius told her that the world was ready for a new lovegood. xenophilius told his daughter that if she wanted it to, the world could bend to her in words. he gave her a dream, and luna wanted it to be true.

the hat tried to offer her hufflepuff. "ravenclaw isn't what it was, my child. hufflepuff is a gentler house of late, and you need gentleness, merlin knows. take hufflepuff instead."

but luna, this girl who looked like a wild winter so wispy white, did not waver. "ravenclaw, if you please," she said, and took the eagle. she wanted to be a writer, to drown in books, to stay up till three reading up on magical creatures and to travel the world; she took ravenclaw because she wanted to drink in knowledge like nectar or a gift. she wanted to be overwhelmed by it. she wanted to drown in it.

luna was a romantic. she took ravenclaw because it felt like a place where creativity came easy as breathing. luna took it for everything she needed it to mean and nothing else. luna took ravenclaw the same way harry potter would have taken slytherin if there had been no draco malfoy dressed in emerald green to dissuade him, no ron weasley, just the hat's song and his own ambitious heart to go on. luna lovegood had nothing but her father's stories, so she chose sapphires over diamonds.

she chose wrong.

she had taken ravenclaw because her father had told her it would be more forgiving than gryffindor's swords. she had taken it because it was more open than slytherin's shadowed common room. she had taken it because he had told her that hufflepuffs were hard workers and that ravenclaw was gentler. luna was borne with a glittering stain in her heart, one that screamed every time she moved. her mother had been a woman with an round, full-moon face. luna had thought perhaps she would find her mother's legacy among the eagles.

she had thought wrong.

the people of ravenclaw thought that knowledge was a hard, is a wretched weapon, one that tears and rips. luna knew that it wasn't but sometimes it was hard to not think that knowledge could break you. it was when they held it. ravenclaw's mascot was not a dove, even though luna was. ravenclaw took an eagle for its mascot, with its golden claws like swords. they never held back because that would be mercy. there is no cruelty worse than knowledge.

luna wanted to protest it all, because luna knew better. luna wandered outside and spoke to the thestrals. she told them about the thousand myths of scheherazade. luna knew from her mother that if you offered gently enough, knowledge could be healing instead of destruction.

luna had a dorm room that was mostly empty. there were only five girls in her year who chose ravenclaw out of the forty girls that came to hogwarts in the autumn of '92. penelope clearwater told her bitterly, knowledge was a boys' sport.

boys- the boys of ravenclaw all had long faces that ended in a point. they raised their chins, their noses, their heads, and looked down with their bright white eyes that shone like lamps down at her, spotlights that marked her out and made her shrink, a deer in their white headlights.

the hat was right. ravenclaw was not what it was when rowena ravenclaw had built it out of paint splatters and ink strokes and dreams. luna stood for hours outside the knocker because none of the questions had the right answers. logic was not for luna- her intelligence was built out of kindness, out of the softest palms, out of colorful creativity. luna was built from emotion and everything came harder for her, so her punishment came like this:

she waited in her bare feet, far too often. once a week, the riddle was wrong. once a week, the ivory towers locked her out.

she slept on the floor when the knocker refused to let her in. there were hidden clothes in a janitor's closet, and cho chang would always give her the password to the prefect's bathroom.

the granite was cold, but luna was used to freezing. her blood was icy from years of winter, a long hibernation that never passed. condensation lived inside of her mouth. this was nothing new, not after living alone for four long years with a grieving widower who had forgotten he was a father. ice lived on her lips and froze her eyelashes till they were icicles. this was nothing new.

(on the bad days, he told her that it was her fault her mother died. on the good days, she was still carrying those words with her).

this is not a story about the luna who laughed and danced barefoot. this luna would not yet wear bright yellow to a wedding- not yet. this luna did not brush off insults that easy- she carried weights in her. a backfiring spell and a cold grave waited in the sickening pit of her stomach. her father's blame- that was twined into her hair and weighted down her head like a flower crown would have in another story. this is a story about the luna who carried those words with her like knives and opened her wrists with them at night. this luna was liquid where she would have otherwise evaporated.

this luna was not naive, and she was not hopeful. she had been once. when she had been young she had gone to a sapphire house to find that it was all filled up with water, and the silver sharks pulled her down till she drowned.

the first ravenclaw boy she knew was named terry boot. he called her childish. the noun sounded like mother's breath in poetry, but the adjective was much more sharp in a dormitory- the adjective could cut bone. it was a lesson in parts of speech. she had not known that grammar could be cruel.

no one else helped. no one wanted to. maybe no one could have, but that was no excuse- luna would still remember the pain of having professors look down at her empty hands, her stuttering words, and stamp a red mark in their grade books- she would remember it at twenty, when the freezing came again in a torrent and stole her willingness to leave her bed. she would remember the times when she tried to explain the bile that rose inside her mouth. she would remember that they laughed. who cared for little lost girls? she had no one here, and she was no one here, and here she was nothing but a ghost.

she would remember this: it was another lost girl who saved her. ginny weasley, a gryffindor with hair red as fire and a mouth even redder. if luna was a little lost girl all white with snow, ginny was a phoenix with her fire gone out.

this was a different story. in this story, luna does not brush off their insults. in this story luna flinches, because words are knives and this is a girl who couldn't shake off death as easily as breathing. she saw the signs because they are her own.

when ginny entered her compartment during her second year, luna stared. when ginny snapped a rebuke- a sarcastic question- luna did not look away. she saw claw marks, and she ached and rejoiced and raged all at once.

luna took her hands and traced her palms. "are you okay?" she asked, because luna knew broken when she saw it.

the answer was no.

ginny weasley would become tall, freckled, beautiful. she would become a raging inferno. ginny wanted to become tall and raging and fierce, wanted to be able to strike down everyone who hurt her. ginny weasley would have the power in her to kill voldemort, someday.

but not now.

right now, ginny was just trying to figure out who she was. she'd left her full name in that chamber. ginevra was gone, and only ginny remained. he had left black fingermarks on her body and no showers could get them out of her skin. sometimes she could see his handwriting in her notes. sometimes she could feel the wisps of him curling round her body.

luna told ginny soft secrets behind the greenhouses. luna showed her all the spots in the castle where you could be alone if you had a panic attack. luna brought her to the thestrals, those invisible monsters that just needed love. ginny saw them, even though luna hadn't expected her too- in the chamber she had seen her own death, she'd seen the death of a seventh of a soul. ginny took luna's hand and told her they were beautiful.

ginny gave luna sweets that arthur had sent her, on the bad days. ginny gave her ginny showed luna how to fly a broom. luna would never be a quidditch player, but the way the wind captured her heart and her hair and blew it all away was ecstasy, was heaven, was glory that she had never known. luna flew above the clouds and wanted to never return. luna told ginny that there was nothing more beautiful than the sky.

(luna would tell her later that she'd lied. ginny- ginny was more beautiful than the sky).

they helped each other. these two broken kids- what could they do but save each other? ginny said, " _you are worth more than this_ ," and gave luna hugs that reached down and shone light into the darkest corners of her bones. luna whispered, " _it was not your fault_ ," and held ginny's hands when they shook, kept her steady. kept her on her feet.

ginny marched up to the ravenclaw tower and found out today's riddle. ginny didn't know the answer, but she knew hermione, and she asked her for an answer. ginny gave luna gryffindor's password when there was no other choice. luna sat with ginny in the infirmary when she spiraled down again, on the days when tom riddle lurked in each dark, handsome face. she gave her the homework and tutored her through every lesson that ginny had not been there for until ginny could have recited the lesson plans in her sleep.

it was so small. they would both think that it was too little to be worth much, to be an adequate repayment for what the other had given them. they both gave everything and were shocked by the fact that they received it in return.

it was enough. this was enough.

together, they found other lost souls in hogwarts. ginny introduced neville longbottom to luna. neville knew tragedies- his family was one. his home was yet another open grave. his grandmother was a mourner who dressed in black, and he was a reminder of a failure. neville had never lived somewhere that was not tainted by his parents' ghosts. neville stood in hospital wards and saw his parents he had never known, and didn't know what to say except for _i'm sorry_ and _it should've been me_ and _this is all my fault._

neville did not feel safe in his own body. did not feel like a real human being. felt fake and wrong. a plaster statue posing as marble. neville is afraid someday his magic will fizzle out the way he always knew it would and they will know he knew. a liar. he had to live up to his father and his mother and he knew he never could.

luna told him _you are real and magic and true. you are not a lie._ she traced runes on his body and made soft quiet predictions of how good his next test he'd do. ginny told him _you are braver than i am if you can get through this._ she took him out for lunch in hogsmeade and introduced him to pretty boys and pretty girls. she taught him how to fly. he and luna sat in the library together and talked about fear.

luna told him _you can't be fearless. but you can be brave._

they were all brave in their own small ways. luna braved a hostile common room every night. ginny did not listen to the whispers of a boy long dead. neville did badly on tests and tried so hard not to hate himself for it.

neville stumbled upon hannah abbott alone in the owlery. hannah had panic attacks at the slightest mistake. her mother was a lawyer and her father was an important ministry worker. if she brought home an E instead of an O (which was often) the resulting battle shook their house wide open. hannah had too much on her shoulders for a teenager. hannah was twitchy, wide-eyed, looked as if she'd run if you looked at her wrong. sometimes she did.

neville held her hands and said, _you are good enough._ he commiserated with her about expectations. in bed at night he told her that she was more than what her parents wanted to be. when hannah got an E on her herbology owl, they all went out for milkshakes and she forgot about her parents. when she got an A in charms, they went up to her room and brought her hot cocoa.

it was luna who found pansy parkinson shivering in myrtle's bathroom. pansy was the great and terrible slytherin queen, an ice statue. she was the envy of every slytherin, the bane of astoria, of harry- she was draco's consort. every gryffindor knew pansy and hated her in equal measure.

none of them knew her. not a single one of them cared about her compulsive urge to tear herself apart that stole its way into her bones and stained her bed bright scarlet every night. none of them knew that she needed too much, too fast, everything sharp and hard and dangerous. she couldn't live without being looked at.

luna stroked her hair and told her it was going to be alright. luna knew about feeling like you were going to fall apart. she knew isolation. when it got bad, luna took away the razors and substituted it with a project. when she wanted them to, both luna and neville and ginny would listen when pansy cried about the bad days.

ginny found marietta edgecombe crying in the broom sheds. there's a funny sort of thing about falling in love with your mourning best friend, a funny sort of thing about being in love with a girl who may never love again. it kind of makes you hate yourself, you see? there's nothing worse than knowing you are a selfish freak who doesn't deserve her.

ginny told her that it wasn't her fault. ginny knew the pain of love (and related matters)- she had fallen for a ghost boy, a poltergeist who stole her life and her dreams and her name. worst of all, he'd stolen her heart. ginny knew the pain of loving someone who didn't love you back, who couldn't love you back, be it due to a lack of a soul or due to a dead boyfriend. ginny told her there were others that would love her as hard as an exploding star and as soft as freshly laundered sheets.

after hermione hexed marietta, both luna and ginny stopped speaking to hermione for three weeks. all of them pored over books to find a counter for her jinx and gave her concealer to hide the pimple scars. when the heartbreak of cho was too much, they went up to her room and watched sad muggle romance movies together. they taught marietta to love herself above anyone else.

their group of lost souls kind of became a collection. ginny weasley, luna lovegood. neville longbottom. hannah abbott. pansy parkinson. marietta edgecombe. it grew larger. lavender brown and parvati patil, two closeted girls in love, weathering a war and holding hands- in this story, lavender is bitten but does not die, and parvati brews wolfsbane for her every month after the war.

astoria greengrass, a lonely pureblood without the use of her legs who fell in love with a muggleborn. her girlfriend rose zeller, who was schizophrenic and was honestly appalled at the lack of mental health resources in the wizarding world. susan bones with their shaking heart and short hair and quiet knowledge- they said, "i'm not a girl" and did not apologize for it. the list went on.

they learned how to save each other.

things changed after the war, but they didn't- they were young but they were no longer children. they had lived through seven years together. seven years of a war that was waged quietly until it wasn't. they all went their separate ways, but they kept in touch. there's a skype group to this day titled 'the skype group of mentally ill gay wicca'.

after the war, ginny broke up with harry potter and went home. she was going to be in the limelight, but it wouldn't be as a savior's wife. she was her own being, her own savior. instead, she called up luna and asked her if she'd want to move into a small london apartment with her. she accepted the job offer from the holyhead harpies and went to work. she was not lost.

after the war, neville did not go home. he accepted the herbology professor position at hogwarts and let his grandmother's angry calls go unanswered. he tended every magical plant and let it grow. he tended each young student just as gently. neville didn't want the limelight. his work was one that went thankless, but he didn't mind. helping these flowers, plants and children alike, grow? that was enough. he was not lost.

after the war, the first thing luna did was adopt a cat. after that, she took over the quibbler and revamped it, sections on mental health and gender identity alongside sections on crumple-horned snorkacks and tilted sirens. she made it her own. xenophilius still sent owls, but she stopped answering them in favor of kissing ginny every night. she laughed loudly. she danced in and out of the limelight as she pleased. she was not lost.

there were bad days where she froze back up again, but they were offset by days where she lived, a young woman lovely and in love. those days, she drank coffee and took pictures of her adopted cat and skyped those she had left behind every day. she sent neville packages with every new magical plant she discovered and she still owned a broom.

ginny rolled over in bed one night and said, "i'm so glad i met you."

luna's eyes stared back at her, as sweet as morning dew. "so am i. you saved me."

"no," ginny said. "no- i think we both saved each other. i think we saved ourselves."

* * *

 **info on what disorders the characters have in this piece:**

 _luna has ptsd from her mother's death and the mild child neglect / verbal abuse she received from her father, mild avoidant personality disorder, and depression._

 _ginny has ptsd from the abuse she faced at tom riddle's hands, borderline personality disorder, and depression._

 _neville longbottom has depression, imposter syndrome, avoidant personality disorder, and anxiety._

 _hannah abbott has generalized anxiety disorder._

 _pansy parkinson has borderline personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression._

 _marietta edgecombe has histrionic personality disorder- something that really isn't touched upon, but. yeah._

 _thats it lmao :) i hope u like this._


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